Our solar system has but one planet orbiting in what is commonly known as the habitable zone -- at a distance from the host star where water could be liquid at times rather than always ice or gas. That planet, of course, is Earth. But from a theoretical, dynamical perspective, does this always have to …
Continue reading "How Many Habitable Zone Planets Can Orbit a Host Star?"
This column was written for Many Worlds by Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett. Wong is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington's Astronomy and Astrobiology program and is a member of NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) initiative as part of the university's Virtual Planetary Laboratory team. Bartlett is a postdoctoral …
Continue reading "Thinking About Life (or Lyfe) Through The Prism of “Star Trek”"
https://videopress.com/v/lEFuz7Sl?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmanyworlds.space%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F01%2FScreenshot-2020-01-27-at-22.42.43.png&preloadContent=metadata Explainer video for Earth-Like. (Vimeo edition with subtitles here) Are we alone? The question hangs over each discovery of an Earth-sized planet as we speculate on its habitability. But how different and varied could these worlds really be? Perhaps the best way to get a flavor of this potential diversity is to build a …
Continue reading "Exactly How Like Our Earth is an Earth-like Planet?"
When the the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, it featured the now-iconic two-sun, "circumbinary" planet Tatooine. At that time astronomers didn't really know if such solar systems existed, with more than one sun and at least one planet. Indeed, the first extra-solar planet wasn't detected until the early 1990s. And the first …
Just about everything that scientists see as essential for extraterrestrial life -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and sources of energy -- is now known to be pretty common in our solar system and beyond. It's basically there for the taking by untold potential forms of life. But what is not at all common …
Candidate exoplanets as seen by TESS in a southern sky mosaic from 13 observing sectors. (NASA/MIT/TESS) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has finished its one year full-sky observation of Southern sky and has found hundreds of candidate exoplanets and 29 confirmed planets. It is now maneuvering its array of wide-field telescopes and cameras to …
Earlier this week, the two men who detected the first planet outside our solar system that circled a sun-like star won a Nobel Prize in physics. The discovery heralded the beginning of the exoplanet era -- replacing a centuries-old scientific supposition that planets orbited other stars with scientific fact. The two men are Michel Mayor, …
Continue reading "The Remarkable Race to Find the First Exoplanet, And the Nobel Prize It Produced"
The newest space telescope in the sky -- NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS -- has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name. The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from …
Continue reading "Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS"
Four years ago, the International Astronomical Union organized a competition to give popular names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets that orbit them. The event encouraged 570,000 people to vote and the iconic planet 51 Pegasi b became "Dimidium, " 55 Cancri b became "Galileo," and (among others) Formalhaut b became "Dagon." It remains unclear …
Continue reading "A Grand Global Competition to Name 100 ExoWorlds"
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
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